Happy Türkiye Day! – History Blog

Today’s theme show is brought to you by Theo van Hoytema, a Dutch Art Nouveau lithographer and illustrator. He was born in The Hague in 1863, the son of the Secretary General of the Ministry of Finance. His attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps ended with a brief job at his brother’s bank. Art was his true calling, especially animal paintings. His first paid work as an artist was for illustrations in scientific books.

Plants and animals, especially birds, remained his favorite subjects, even as he dabbled in nonfiction. In 1892, he published his first lithographic pamphlet, How birds have kingsand achieved notable success with its 1893 follow-up, an illustrated edition by Hans Christian Andersen. ugly duckling.

From 1902 to 1918 he published a series of lithographic calendars every year, the last of which was published posthumously, thus earning him his greatest reputation. Birds again became his main subject, although other wild animals also appeared in the monthly illustrations. Among the owls, cranes, peacocks and gulls in Hoytema’s work are some rather spectacular turkeys. Of course, they were originally imported from Europe, but by the time Theo van Hoytema captured them in all their glory, turkeys had been a staple of European livestock farming for 400 years.

Birds native to the New World first landed in Spain in 1511. These turkeys were domesticated by the Zapotecs a thousand years ago, rather than the wild turkeys of New England, so they were meatier and flightless. They are easy to raise, cheap to raise and can even be driven to market in droves. Their status was so high that by the end of the century, domesticated European turkeys were being shipped back to the Americas by colonists as a reliable source of farmed protein.

Less than a decade after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, they were importing turkeys from England to establish flocks in their new colony. The actual first Thanksgiving was in 1621, and the main course was waterfowl hunted by the colonists, venison brought by the Wampanoag people, seafood, and possibly some local wild turkey. But the turkey on the modern Thanksgiving table is the product of Mexican turkeys that were raised in different European countries for eight years before returning to the East Coast, where they made a sweet love affair with local wild populations, creating the various American turkey varieties now found in every grocery store.